Many medical service providers such as doctors, nurses, and surgeons use procedure kits, often referred to as surgical packs, surgical kits, and/or sterile procedure trays, that contain a variety of tools and/or implements useful for a particular surgical procedure. The tools are generally disposable, and may include supplies such as covers, gowns, towels, gauze, tubing, syringes, and so forth. As one example, an appendectomy surgical pack for a particular hospital may include twenty or thirty tools specified by the hospital for performing that procedure. When an appendectomy is scheduled, one of the appendectomy-specific surgical kits is retrieved from the stock room and is delivered to the operating room. The surgeon and nurses generally use at least some of the tools during the procedure and then dispose of all the tools after the procedure.
Many such surgical packs are customized and packed to customers' specific requirements. Different customers may require different components for each procedure. For example, one hospital may suture a wound with degradable suture material, while another may prefer non-degradable suture material, and so forth. Some manufacturers offer tens of thousands of different types of surgical packs.
One problem associated with surgical packs (regardless of whether they are a generic offering or a customized offering) is the potential for generating excess waste if, for example, a surgical pack intended for one particular procedure is erroneously opened for a different type of procedure or the surgical pack contains tools that are routinely unused by a given service provider for whatever reason.
Additionally, while surgical packs for routine procedures may include only twenty to thirty items, some surgical packs can include as many as two hundred tools. Thus, many surgical packs tend to be rather large and bulky, making it difficult for a person to manage one or more surgical packs while transporting the pack(s) from storage to the operating room. The applicant has determined that existing approaches in these regards leave room for considerable improvement.
Common but well-understood elements that are useful or necessary in a commercially feasible embodiment are often not depicted in order to facilitate a less obstructed view of these various embodiments of the present invention. Certain actions and/or steps may be described or depicted in a particular order of occurrence while those skilled in the art will understand that such specificity with respect to sequence is not actually required. The terms and expressions used herein have the ordinary technical meaning as is accorded to such terms and expressions by persons skilled in the technical field as set forth above except where different specific meanings have otherwise been set forth herein.